2022 Team Favorites: Gaming Studios

Mark gives us a philosophical assessment on the role of n f t s and gaming and the unintended consequences that n f t s could have on gamers, especially those from poorer backgrounds. All the best for the new year, and we hope you enjoyed this show. Imagine it's October one. Crypto prices are rocketing, Celebrities can't stop talking about n f t s to other celebrities. There's packed conferences and glitzy venues and places like Miami and London attended by

people wearing T shirts with cartoon monkeys on them. If you're an executive at a big gaming studio seeing all of this happen, you might might be forgiven for sending one of those emails with the subject line like n f T strategy question, Mark and several executives of gaming companies did indeed send those emails, and some of their companies rushed to announce plans about how they were going to make blockchain gaming happen. Flash forward about a year

until right now, October twenties twenty two. Celebrities aren't talking about their n f T s, people are trying to sell those apes, and gaming studios don't seem quite so convinced that they even need an n FT strategy anymore. Joining me to discuss this vibe shift our Bloomberg report, Emily Nicole. Definitely, the overwhelming reaction to that marketplace was not positive from both fans and staff who complained very loudly,

and game developer Mark Ventarelli. One of the things that most concerned me in turn society I think we are, it's the depth of imagination, right. I think we're very much a literal society. Mark, Emily, Welcome to the show. Mark. I'm going to start with you because our listeners know who Emily is by now. Please tell us who you are and what brings you here today. Thank you, happy

to be here. My name is Mark Ventorelli and I'm the CEO of Roguesdale, which is a game development studio here in Brazil, and I've been a professional game designer for over fifteen years. Very exciting. As I tell everyone at this point, they all know somehow it working the video games in the industry is like where I would have gone had I not made the decision to be a journalist. So it's always a pleasure to get to talk about videos. Ha ha. Yeah, don't tell my bosses

they listen to this podcast. But you are here today talking to us because you did a very interesting thing a couple of months ago, which is show up on a panel virtually at a conference, start to talk about one thing and then be like, actually, never mind, we're going to talk about n f t s and why

they're ruining video games. And so perhaps that is a strong characterization of your presentation, but you know, I would love to get your perspective as a person working in the industry on what you have observed in terms of this conversation around crypto and gaming, blockchain and gaming, n f t s and gaming, and what has happened for you in the months after you went some my viral

for that talk. I think the answer to that question also clears up a little bit of a misconception around my talk, which is, um, I kind of do change subjects, but it is joking. I mean, I'm an entertainer, right, I know how to commend people people's attentions, uh, with gimmicks and fleshy stuff. That's where we do a lot of the game design. But uh. The name of my talk originally was uh and still is the future of game Design. And in the middle of that talk, I say, actually,

like I'll change the name. I'll change the title the stalk now, and it's going to be why n f T S are an imare? And then I start talking about that. And then at some point after I give enough context about why I think and if he should not be part of this future of game design, I changed the title back to the future game design, and I consuing, and so it was kind of a playful thing, but it was all into like a single concise argument.

And to ask your question about like the motivation, I think it is impossible to discuss the future of game design, the future entertainment, and in many ways the future of humanity right without addressing current friends and technology, without talking about the blockchain specifically, but also an f d S

even more specifically. But I felt like I had a unique point of view being a game designer and also being someone who not only I have working I have been working on the entertainment industry for my entire life.

I also am very much technology enthusiasts. I have been into the blockchain and studying into figuring out how to use it and trying to do stuff with it for many, many years, and I felt like I had a unique point of view to contribute to the overall conversation about gaming plus blockchain, and that's why I felt need to do the talk. As for what changed after the talk, got a lot more Twitter phones. So you're saying it's working.

What you're saying, well, it wasn't my goal right overall, I felt like the goal that I had going into this event, um, we accomplished that. And when I say we, I say not only me, but student everybody who helped me make the talk, also the everybody who on the side of being developers in Brazil specifically agree with my positions. Uh. There was a big movement still is to boycott events like Big Festival, which is our equivalence to the game

developers conference. It's like the biggest bill my conference in Brazil. We have right now to bloycott it because he had crypto sponsors, or because he had crypto gaming, And I said no, like, this is not a crypto event. This is a game development event. Like if you boycotted because we don't agree with things that are there, like we're not doing ourselves any favors we used to be there and to say our piece, not to put two final

points on it. You know you. Emily also interviewed you for a follow up story that I'm gonna ask her about very shortly, and your quotes in that story, you know, just if I may read a piece of it is essentially characterizing the idea of n f T s and video games as a gimmicky technology that provides nothing of

value besides and make money quick scheme. What I would love to get your perspective on is why, as a person who makes games, do you not think there's any value in this particular technology, contrary to what other people who also make games are trying to argue. If I had to choose a few core things, I feel like it is about what games are for in society, because I try and bring a lot about this, like what value do we actually offer to society as artists, as entertainers,

as media creators involved in making video games. I feel like to these days, the players, not only video game players and young people, but especially young people, the the gen z uh, they feel hopeless, they feel powerless, right. It's a generation that looks at all the issues and all the problems that they have ahead of them, and they don't feel like they have what it takes to

take them on. And I think the video games, among many, many, many other things, is a place where you can be powerful, where your actions can be meaningful, where you can be the hero right, where you can have a power fantasy to control fantasy, where you can feel like you're in control. You're important, you matter, your actions matter, your decisions matter.

And this is all relates to your concept, which is very important game design technically, which is meaning right, Um, And what I think that everything that has been done in the space and it was always the intention to do that, right, Like, it's not a surprise that and if these are doing to bring economic factors into gaming in a way that brings the one thing that really don't want to from the real world into games or

any other kind of entertainment, which is oppression. So when you bring economic uh, real world economics into game design, what you do and again I'm simplifying this very much. I go into into this more in depth in My Dog, But what effectively what you're doing is you're bringing oppression into these into these spaces, right, which you're supposed to be fantasy spaces, spaces of imagination, spaces of empowerment, spaces spaces of meaning. Right, Like I suddenly you are oppressed

in the VIG game. You no longer can win. But I think that's the thing about one of the things about classic games and classic game design is you always can win. It's always possible to win. Right. The moments where you feel like it's no longer possible to win is the moment where the game is no longer relevant, like I don't want to play anymore. It's not it's not possible to win. And that's not true too many real word uh interactions, right, is not always possible to win,

and and that that's what oppression is. And when you bring this into games, you destroy the possibility of winning. You say, you know the phrase that you use there which I find is very interesting, is kind of like in classic or classical game design, because the idea of pay to win was certainly not invented by crypto people.

You know that that is the casualization of mobile gaming, the idea of loop boxes, the idea of gotcha, the whole notion of sure, you can get to level five, but if you want to get to level fifty, it's gonna cost you either tens of thousands of hours of your life or hundreds of dollars. Um has been extremely prevalent in in games for a long time, you know, like from in app purchase to d l c s too.

Like you buy a hero, you know, forget just kind of the economics of consumables, but the the actual mechanical pricing of if you really want the sword and this sort is the thing that you're gonna need to you know, be the hero, it's gonna cost you money. So those those elements aren't crypto specific what you're describing, but they are, in your argument, even more profound in a crypto context. Yes,

I think so, either equivalent or worse. We'll be right back with more from Bloomberg reporters Emily Nicole and video

game developer Mark Ventarelli. Emily, I'm gonna go to you to just, you know, sort of zoom out a little bit, because you started reporting on the intersection of crypto and gaming when various executives at other studios, particularly the larger ones, thought it was a good idea, and you know, you had various folks who you will name, be like, yeah, what we actually need to do is design an n FT exchange thing where players can monetize, and they made

you know, it's They took all of the arguments that Mark is making that are negative and thrown them into things and like, here the reasons why these are good for our players? Who were some of those folks, and what's the status of those projects right now? I think one of the easiest and the largest publishers to point to on that front is the French publisher Ubisoft, which makes the very very very popular game franchise Assassin's Creed.

Because they started their kind of I guess you call them web three n f T experiments last year and they came out with a marketplace that was specifically for one of their games, um and it was released to the public pretty early. Did have all the usual markers of like this is a beta test, etcetera. But you know, anybody can access to Anybody could buy the n f t s if they were things like swords and guns and um and various outfits and things that you could

play in this game. But after a few months of being active, pretty much nobody was buying them. The prices were pretty low, and within you know, by April this year, the whole thing was shut down and it was no longer active. And if you hear Upisoft talk about that project now, the conversation very much goes like, well, this was early research. We were thinking about Web three, we were thinking about how we could do this, and we're exploring things. And just because we shut it down doesn't

mean we're not thinking about Web three anymore. We're not doing things on blockchain. But definitely, the overwhelming reaction to that marketplace was not positive, from both fans and staff, who complained very loudly externally and internally about the fact that uposoft was doing something with npt s. Mark I have a question for you about It's it's based on,

you know, the cleon phrase like great artists steal. Is there anything about the arguments that proponents of n f T S, etcetera making about blockchain about you know this, this theoretical future in which more of your fun in game things are interoperable. Are any of those as concepts separate from the you know what folks like to call the to economics or the economics of these tokens interesting to game developers? Honestly, Um, there isn't, in my opinion,

anything in that space that works separately from toconomics. That's actually the one question that if you ask people are proposing these kinds of systems usually breaks them, like like if it's okay, but besides the economics, besides the economic factor, besides all these things, what are you proposing here? And it's usually like said everything you'll just new again, like the things about, for example, interpreterability, like this is not in itself a new idea. Uh, at large scale is

a terrible idea. I see people talking about the metaverse, for example, as if well, like you can get an item from game acts and then you can use it on the game. Why that that sounds fun and it could be fun if it is designed with intent. But the idea of the metaverse and the there's an idea of interpretability that people would have on the dog free space. It's to make it ubiquitous. Right. When you do that, this is actually a nightmare. You're just from moving designers

the ability to create meaning. Like a talk about this in my talk as well. Like there's a thing game design called the magic circle, which is a way that game designers we can imbute things with meaning. Right. So here in Brazil, we play a lot of soccer on the streets, right, and then we use flip flops to mark where the goal is. Right, So we're just taking flip flops and saying, hey, this is the goal. They are no longer flip flops inside of this magic circle

that we're defining here. So that is one of the

poor verbs of game designers to imbue with meaning, right. Uh. And when you try to create these ubiquitous interpretability rising games, but what you're actually doing is you're creating these like a ooze of everything is the same thing as the like token token ization in terms of cultural terms, right, it's the end goal these these people, right, they actually want to destroy art, like, uh, is the same thing like if you see like Fortnite, for example, like you

really like Spider Man. Well, you can be Spiderman Fortnite and then you can like shoot an a K for a seven at Naruto or something like that. Right when you're doing that, it's no longer the Spider Man. Right. If you like Peter Parker, if you like Miles Morause, like if you like these kinds of characters, and that's why you like Peer Parker, and that's why I like Spider Man. Sorry, uh, that person there, that character there is just the brand. It's just a token. It's not

Miles Morause. It's just Spider Man, the token, right, it is. It's it's not there's no death to it. There's no real meaning to it. It's empty. It's soulless. And what you actually achieve if you try to do a large scale interoperability between games is that you destroy this meaning. You just try that. You destroy arts to start expression, you strike character, you destroy subjectivity, like, uh, you're just everything becomes literal. And that's one of the things that

most concerned me in current society. I think we are it's the death of imagination, right, I think we're very much a literal society. Like the current rise of like alt rights and stuff like that is very much connected to people being very literal as a spons to an overload of our of our senses, of our ability to interpret this overload of information coming at us, right, the swarm of information coming at us, and to make everything

just literal. That is extremely dangerous, not only to video game an artistic expression in general and entertainment, but for us as a society. I love a podcast that is both existential and spicy at the same time. So I think we are. I think we're gonna end it there. Thank you both, Emily, Thank you very much, Mark Brigada. It was a pleasure having you both on the show. You can find more of Emily Nicole's reporting on the Bloomberg Terminal on Bloomberg dot com or follow her on Twitter.

She's at Emily J. Nicole. On the next episode of Bloomberg Crypto, there's nothing straightforward about a crypto bankruptcy, and in finance, where there's complexity, there's gonna be someone ready to make money from the chaos. On this next episode, you'll hear from one of the people who's finding opportunities in the crypto distress. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Send us your comments, questions, or suggestions for the show to Crypto at Bloomberg dot net or find us on Twitter. We're at Crypto. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky Verglina. Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producer is Mohammed Faruk. Associate producer is Moses on the Desto wonder At is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidran. I'm Stacy Maria Ishmael. We'll be back tomorrow two